Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1912,
" . . .
[p. 51] "The most complete version of this invasion scenario came in 1909 from [p. 52] Homer Lea, a Southern Californian, and the English naval strategist Hector Bywater in 1925. Born in Denver in 1875, and moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1892, Homer Lea was one of these eccentrics touched by genius whom one frequently encounters in turn-of-the century Southern California. Despite his diminutive stature (five feet) and a curved spine, which earned him the nickname "Little Scrunch-Neck" among his classmates at Los Angeles High School, Lea dreamed of a military career (as did his contemporary George Smith Patton, Jr. then attending a private academy in Pasadena.) Educated at Occidental and Stanford, Lea became involved with Chinese students committed to the overthrow of the imperial system and the establishment of a republic. In July 1895, just before the outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion, Lea sailed for China in search of further involvement. Concealing his republican sympathies, he seems to have wrangled some sort of military commission in the army of the Emperor. In any event, he appeared at the relief of Peking in the last days of the Boxer Rebellion wearing the uniform of a lieutenant general (the rank authorized in his imperial commission, presumably) and directing a ragtag army of reform volunteers.
"When it became apparent that there would be no republic in China, not yet at least, Lea returned to Los Angeles in 1901 wearing his general's uniform. He spent the next few years writing and lecturing on military matters. Among other activities, Lea drilled Chinese students in military fundamentals, in the hopes of preparing them to serve as officers in a revolutionary republican army. Lea's assistant and chief drill master was Ansel O'Banion, a leather-lunged former sergeant in the United States Cavalry who had later secured a commission in the Philippine constabulary. Lea returned to China in 1904 on behalf of the republican movement, and was in Nanking in 1911, the only white man in the room, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with whom Lea had worked closely in Sun Yat-sen's California exile, was elected President of the newly formed Republic of China. Three years before his death in 1912, Harper & Brothers published Homer Lea's The Valor of Ignorance (1909), the result of long study and extensive reconnaissance of the Pacific Coast he and O'Banion had conducted after his return from China.
"In the first third of The Valor of Ignorance Lea developed the thesis that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable because of economic competition. Lea was no crude Japan-basher. On the contrary, he admired the Japanese for their intelligence, enterprise, and military skill. Lea devoted the middle third of his book to a discussion of Japanese military capabilities on land and at sea. Japan, Lea observed, was capable of fielding an invasion army of 1.25 million men. Its navy was the finest on the planet, and it was capable of transporting in one troop transport ship more soldiers than the British had brought to the United States during the entire War of 1812. A military invasion of the Coast, Lea concluded, was fully in the reach of the Japanese from the point of view of their population and industrial capacity, the skill and training of their general staffs and officer corps, and the technical capacity of their army and navy. As important as any of [p. 53] this, the Japanese possessed bushido, the code of the samuri, an instinctive affinity for the sword (in Franz Boas's later term) running parallel to their love of the chrysanthemum.
In the final third of The Valor of Ignorance, Lea sketched a scenario of Japanese invasion, which later read as an almost eerie prediction of the course of the Second World War in the Pacific. First, Lea argued, the Japanese would seize and occupy the Philippines. From there, they would move to Samoa, Hawaii, the Aleutians, and Alaska, establishing in each a center of overlapping strategic spheres, which would give them control of the entire Pacific. The attack on the Pacific Coast would come on three axes: Washington State, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles and the South Coast. With extensive detail and maps, the result of his and O'Banion's surveys, Lea described how the Japanese could land at Santa Monica Bay, seize Los Angeles, and rapidly seal off most of Southern California. Landing in Monterey Bay, the Japanese would move north and encircle San Francisco, bombarding it from strategic heights around the Bay until it surrendered. Eventually, a Japanese army of more than 1.25 million men would establish a defensive perimeter in the Sierra Nevada. It would take years, perhaps a decade, for an American army to be raised, trained, and successfully employed against the invaders.
"As a prophetic document, The Valor of Ignorance gained credibility, indeed great power, through its detailed plausibility. Lea envisioned the Japanese invasion of California down to the emplacement of specific artillery batteries. He had personally surveyed landing beaches and deployment routes and had reviewed all relevant military maps to back up his assertions. Lea also grasped the essential isolation of California, sealed off as it was by the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin beyond: an isolation that meant California could be seized and defended by Japanese invaders.
"The general staffs of the United States and Japan each took Lea's scenario seriously enough to incorporate it into their own contingency plans. Dining with a group of Army officers in Manila in October 1941 Clare Booth Luce was treated to a description by Colonel Charles Willoughby of how the Japanese would soon be moving on the Philippines. Luce asked Willoughby his source of information. The colonel laughed. "Just quoting military gospel," he told her, "according to Homer Lea." Willoughby went on to describe how his generation of officers had first encountered Lea in their readings at West Point. Among staff officers in the Philippines, The Valor of Ignorance was considered established doctrine. Luce returned to the United States and wrote an article on Lea for the Saturday Evening Post, which Harper & Brothers used in 1942 as an introduction to a reissue of a book whose prophecies-an attack on Hawaii, the siege of the Philippines, a deployment into Southeast Asia-were now in the process of coming true.
"In 1909 the plausibility of The Valor of Ignorance was especially high among Californians. Homer Lea might be a shadowy and eccentric figure, but no one [p. 54] less than Lieutenant General Adna Chaffee, the retired chief of staff of the United States Army, wrote the preface to the first edition of Lea's book. Chaffee was not only a retired chief of staff, he was a Los Angeleno as well-someone, that is, fully capable for reasons other than his military career of saying that, yes, the Japanese would one day invade the Coast. This was no fantasy, Chaffee argued, merely an inevitability Homer Lea had envisioned and analyzed.
"Brilliant in his depictions of the land war in California, Homer Lea was rather sketchy when it came to details of the Japanese naval strategy in the Pacific. This scenario was left for Hector Bywater . . ."